By Elona Malterre 
          Alberta, with a history of implementing big ideas, is ready for the next huge leap in clean energy production, says the head of the Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists and Geophysicists of Alberta (APEGGA).

          Leah Lawrence, president of APEGGA, told a sold-out Sustainable Industrial Development for the 21st Century (SID21c) luncheon in Calgary in early September that she thinks about a comment by Preston Manning nearly every day when she goes to work.

          “‘The time is right for the next big idea and I think it should be inspired around natural spaces and the environment,’” Lawrence said, quoting the former head of the Reform Party of Canada. 

          Lawrence presented a short history of Alberta energy, starting with Canadian politician and judge Frederick Haultain, then moving to former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed’s contribution, and ending with former Alberta premier Ralph Klein’s deregulation of the province’s electricity system.  

          Haultain was among the most active politicians in the fight to create the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan and to implement responsible government, she said. He became the first premier of the Northwest Territories, in a political career marked by a tireless effort on behalf of the NWT’s right to strong political power.

          Lougheed, who died at age 84 on September 13, served as Alberta’s premier from 1971 to 1985.          

          Lawrence documented Lougheed’s battles with Ottawa and the federal government of then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau over a national energy policy.

          With Lougheed as the province’s champion, Alberta demanded to be consulted prior to discussions on natural gas and oil between the federal government and the United States, she said, joking that “The more things change, the more they stay exactly the same.” 

          Earlier this year, Policy Options magazine named Lougheed as the best provincial premier of the last 40 years (see http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1256782--alberta-s-peter-lougheed-seen-as-best-provincial-premier-in-recent-times).   

          Lawrence described how Lougheed’s vision and character helped shape Alberta into the energy giant that it is today – including overcoming initial energy industry resistance to developing the oilsands. “I think a lot of times we think it was easy to develop our oilsands,” she said.  

          Lawrence, who had access to the Peter Lougheed archives, said the premier faced a lot of antagonism from CEOs of conventional oil producers over encouraging oilsands development.

          “Interesting thing is, a lot of people hand wrote letters back then,” she said.

          “So you can actually see the letters to Peter Lougheed from conventional oil producer CEOs, saying: ‘We can’t stand this . . . this is ridiculous. Why are you subsidizing oilsands . . .?’” 

           Lawrence said that former MP Harvey Andre told her a story of how Lougheed handled the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers’ (CAPP) hostility toward oilsands development. 

          Lougheed had a graph that showed how the government’s royalties from conventional oil were declining, while the province’s needs and revenue requirements were increasing.

          “And he called them (CAPP officials) all down to the (government’s) McDougall Centre, because he would never go to the CAPP offices. And the CEOs came of the conventional oil producers,” Lawrence said.      

          “And the premier said, ‘Well, gentleman, here’s my graph. You can see I have two solutions to my revenue problem with the province: We can invest together in long-term future development and research and development around oilsands, or I can raise your royalties. Which would you prefer?’”

          The audience laughed at the end of Lawrence’s story.However, she noted that Lougheed was ready to implement his option of raising royalties, because he had done so twice before. 

          She told her audience, which included many environmental professionals, that “The work we do is at the nexus of regulatory and public policy, resource potential and enabling technologies and business fundamentals.”

          Lawrence said that when Lougheed confronted CAPP over raising royalties, the situation included:

              • existing industry wanting to preserve the status quo; 

              • a leader trying to implement long-term policy change that would revolutionize the province’s       economy;

              • a populace ready for change because of the oil price shocks caused by the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s. 

          “I think that lots of times we forget that it’s not just business fundamentals we’re talking about, or it’s not just a single regulatory policy change. There’s a whole confluence of things that need to come together.”

          Every story has many facets, said Lawrence, alluding to Socrates and his parable of how people chained to a wall in a cave with a fire behind them perceive their shadows as reality, when reality is in fact the world outside the cave. 

          She encouraged people working on sustainability initiatives to try and predict the future, because sometimes change “can result in something you didn’t count on.” 

          For example, the deregulation of the electrical industry in the latter half of the 1990s, by then-premier Ralph Klein’s government, resulted in Alberta becoming a leader in clean energy production across Canada, Lawrence said.

          She related how John Keating, former president of pioneering Calgary-based pioneering wind power developer Canadian Hydro Developers, was once asked why all the clean energy projects in Ontario and Quebec were being won by Alberta-based companies.  

          Keating, she recalled, replied: “‘About 10 years ago we deregulated the electricity market in Alberta, and that allowed for competition in Alberta.’”   This meant that Alberta companies had 10 years of experience in developing clean energy projects, “before the rest of the country went to their RFPs (Request for Proposals) for renewable energy.

          So by the time they did that, we were ready, we were competent, we knew how to be comfortable in that space,” Lawrence said.

          “I love that story, because . . . I’m going to be a little impertinent . . . but I don’t think Ralph Klein and the boys sat around saying, ‘Hey, how are we going to get renewable energy into this market?’”

          “I just don’t think that (renewable energy) was the starting place for their discussion. It was a lot of ideology about free markets. In the end, what it delivered to Alberta was a competitive edge that was sustainable for a number of years.” 

          Alberta is still one of the best places in Canada for leadership to drive clean energy projects, Lawrence said.  

           She said that when she goes across the country and talks about sustainability initiatives, people in central Canada, for example, remark that it must be hard to be from Alberta and encourage clean energy here, because of the province’s enormous fossil fuel resources.  

          But Lawrence said that she has found the opposite to be true. She said that Alberta’s uniqueness, with its combined opportunities and challenges, makes it “pretty easy” to encourage clean energy, because:  

              • everyone understands we have a shared challenge;  

              • Albertans understand energy in both business and compliance terms – “we get the whole picture;”  

and 

              • “We understand that the two have to work together to try and make the future we’re trying to create.”  

          However, some members of the audience were more skeptical about the prospects for significantly increasing clean energy development in Alberta.“It’s too easy to get oil out of the ground,” so investors are reluctant to turn to other energy strategies, said Mike Brawn, a now-retired former executive with the Engineering Institute of Canada.

           David Kelly, a partner at SkyFireEnergy Solar Energy Systems, said there are lots of ways of “incenting new energy production, but again it has to be a level playing field.”

          In a deregulated market, the biggest challenge is that the cheapest energy source wins, he said.While acknowledging that solar is not necessarily the cheapest energy source, “it has other advantages that don’t get factored in to the overall picture” or financially accounted for in the value of energy production, Kelly said.

          For example, “a distributed solar system . . . reduces the loading on the (electrical) transmission system (and) makes the power system more reliable,” he said.

          According to Alberta Energy's Communications Public Affairs Officer, Kristiana Indradat, the government's coal royalties for 2011 were $17.8 million.

          About 45 per cent of Alberta’s electricity is generated by coal-fired power plants.In 2010, the Electricity/Heat Generation sector emitted about 21 per cent of Alberta’s greenhouse gas emissions – the same percentage as the oilsands industry, according to Alberta Environment and Sustainable Development.

           “That’s what we’re dealing with . . . they have free rein to dump in the sky and there’s no costs,” Kelly said. 

           The mandate of SID21c (http://sid21c.com/), which is entering its fourth year of operation, is to provide a forum in which people can collaborate, exchange ideas, and challenge each other when it comes to sustainable development. 

           SID21c’s next speaker, on October 5, is Alec McDougall, president of ECCO Waste Systems LP, which recently opened a recycling and energy centre in Calgary. EnviroLine